Also a few days ago the Israelis set up a big outdoor tent on a nice spring day and threw a grand Israeli Independence Day celebration. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) is just a few blocks away, constantly tells everyone that it is the only "grassroots" Arab American organization people can count on, and had pretty much forever to plan something. But there was no protest, no demonstration, nothing to shake the Israelis and their friends out of their festive mood and moral lethargy. Indeed, even the yellow-metal police line barricades that had been up across the street from the Embassy for months, just waiting for more demonstrations, were taken down...the new Sharon government apparently deciding there's no reason to even worry about the "client organizations", no more than the "client regimes". But this Israeli writer, Gideon Levy, writing in Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz -- yes, even with all of its subtle and sophisticated biases -- did manage to courageously shake people up abit with this gripping and provocative weekend Op Ed:

[Ha'aretz - 29 April]: Another round of the "days of awe" of the Zionist ethos is behind us - Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day for the Fallen of the IDF, and Independence Day - with their symbols and slogans, some of which are in part lies, and with the increasingly pointed questions about their character. How was it that the state sanctified the memory of the Holocaust for so many years without taking a sufficient interest in the personal fate of its victims? Is it really true that all the fallen soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces "did not die in vain"? And why does the central ceremony which declares the onset of the independence festivities have to be a military ceremony?

But alongside these burdensome questions there is another question, always pending, to which almost no one pays heed: Where are the Palestinians in this story? Isn't it time to bring them into the narrative and, perhaps, also to give the Israeli citizens among them a role?

There is nothing like Independence Day to make manifest Israel's total disregard of the Palestinians. To judge by the character of the day, not only is it the case that a people without land came to a land without a people - as the old, once widespread canard, has it - it is also the case that the Palestinians are absent from the Zionist story to this day. It seems at times as though the only Palestinians who exist in the consciousness of Israelis are those who blow up cars in Israeli cities or who fire mortar shells at Israelis.

It starts with the fact that the day of the state's holiday is the day of the Palestinians' calamity. Israel has never recognized this fact. If it had done so, it might have shown a modicum of consideration to the country's Arab citizens. If we were more sensitive, we would also think twice about celebrating our independence so gaudily when, less than an hour's drive from the sites of the rejoicing, a whole people, which also wants and is entitled to independence, continues to be trampled under the hard occupation of the celebrators of independence.

There is nothing accidental, of course, in the way the Israelis ignore the Palestinians - the citizens of the state, the residents of the territories and the exiled refugees. The roots of the phenomenon are traceable to the early days of the newly established state. For example,those who were born and raised in this country learned to ignore its ruins completely. There is hardly a corner in Israel without remnants of the 418 lost Palestinian villages, most of which Israel destroyed, after which the state authorities taught us - the Israelis who were born after 1948 - to turn our gaze and not recognize the existence of the ruins. The term "Arab house" came to designate a building style and no more.

The story of these "Arab houses" and the story of the ruins by the side of so many roads has never been told to those who received their schooling here. Achziv? A resort village belong to Club Med. The "Green House"? The place where Tel Aviv University holds social and other events.

Worse than this repression is the fact that Israel, displaying almost inhuman insensitivity, has also prevented its Arab citizens from commemorating or mourning the tragedy they suffered. Even though some 200,000 "internal refugees" live in Israel - Israeli citizens, yes, but whose homes and villages have been laid waste - and even though another 4 million refugees live outside Israel, all of them brethren of the country's Arab citizens, Israel has never mustered the courage or the generosity required to allow its Arab citizens to lament their loss properly.

There are no commemorative plaques next to the homes that were destroyed, no memorial ceremonies are held at the site of the villages that were razed, and of course there is no return and no compensation. The repression that Israel has imposed on its residents extends even to the direct victims: We turned our gaze from their tragedy and we forbade them to remember it.

By now, 53 years after Israel's establishment as a state, and in the light of its impressive achievements, different behavior might have been expected. If Israel were more confident of its strength and of its rightness, it would allow the Arab minority to identify openly with its tragedy. If that were the case, Memorial Day and Independence Day would alter their character and give expression also to the other side, the dark side, of the independence celebrations, and to the feelings of the minority on that day. This would not have the effect of undermining the foundations of the state, as the authorities fear, but the opposite: It would be possible to integrate the Arab citizens a bit more into the state which is so estranged from them.

If, on its festive day, the state were also to devote a bit of attention to their fate, since they too are citizens, they would be grateful to the state. They too have their "fallen" and their "martyrs," and above all their refugees and displaced persons, and it was absolutely wrong to force them to erase all memory of them.

By the same token, it is high time that Israel's Jewish citizens were told the whole story during the days of commemoration and independence - and not only the heroic chapter of the Zionist enterprise. Not a hair would fall from the heads of Israel's children if the memorial and independence ceremonies included the story of the tragedy that was suffered by the other residents of this land and how one historical wrong, which was inflicted on our people, brought in its wake another wrong, which was inflicted on their people. It would also be good if they were told that while we are celebrating proudly (and rightly so) our independence, there are some 3 million Palestinians living under a cruel occupation who are dreaming of their independence celebrations. Both they and we are deserving of this: The Jews need to hear the whole story and the Arabs are entitled to mourn because of it.

Mid-East Realities

www.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/4/183.htm